Ebooks

This true story of a revolt at a Nazi death camp, newly updated, is “a memorable and moving saga, full of anger and anguish, a reminder never to forget” (San Francisco Chronicle).

On October 14, 1943, six hundred Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war. In this edition of Escape from Sobibor, fully updated in 2012, Richard Rashke tells their stories, based on his interviews with eighteen of the survivors. It vividly describes the biggest prisoner escape of World War II. A story of unimaginable cruelty. A story of courage and a fierce desire to live and to tell the world what truly went on behind those barbed wire fences.

On November 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood was driving on a deserted Oklahoma highway when her car crashed into a cement wall and she was killed. On the seat next to her were doctored quality-control negatives showing that her employer, Kerr-McGee, was manufacturing defective fuel rods filled with plutonium. She had recently discovered that more than forty pounds of plutonium were missing from the Kerr-McGee plant.

Forty years later, her death is still steeped in mystery. Did she fall asleep before the accident, or did someone force her off the road? And what happened to the missing plutonium? The Killing of Karen Silkwood meticulously lays out the facts and encourages the readers to decide. Updated with the author’s chilling new introduction that discusses the similarities with Edward Snowden’s recent revelations, Silkwood’s story is as relevant today as it was forty years ago.

For this updated edition, the author has added the latest information as to what happened to the various people involved in the Silkwood case and news of the lasting effects of this underreported piece of the history of the antinuclear movement.

How the United States protected John Demjanjuk: “A richly researched, gripping narrative about war, suffering, survival, corruption, injustice and morality” (Kirkus Reviews, starred).

John “Iwan” Demjanjuk was at the center of one of history’s most complex war crimes trials. But why did it take almost sixty years for the United States to bring him to justice as a Nazi collaborator? The answer lies in the annals of the Cold War, when fear and paranoia drove American politicians and the U.S. military to recruit “useful” Nazi war criminals to work for the United States in Europe as spies and saboteurs and to slip them into America through loopholes in U.S. immigration policy. During and after the war, that same immigration policy was used to prevent thousands of Jewish refugees from reaching the shores of America. The long and twisted saga of John Demjanjuk, a postwar immigrant and auto mechanic living a quiet life in Cleveland until 1977, is the final piece in the puzzle of American government deceit. The White House, the Departments of War and State, the FBI, and the CIA supported policies that harbored Nazi war criminals and actively worked to hide and shelter them from those who dared to investigate and deport them. The heroes in this story are men and women such as Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and Justice Department prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum, who worked for decades to hold hearings, find and investigate alleged Nazi war criminals, and successfully prosecute them for visa fraud. But it was not until the conviction of John Demjanjuk in Munich in 2011 as an SS camp guard serving at the Sobibor death camp that this story of deceit can be told for what it is: a shameful chapter in American history. Riveting and deeply researched, Useful Enemies is the account of one man’s criminal past and its devastating consequences, and the story of how America sacrificed its moral authority in the wake of history’s darkest moment.

From the author of the internationally acclaimedThe Killing of Karen Silkwood, a fascinating exposé of whistleblowing in America that features the intertwining narratives of Edward Snowden and Karen Silkwood

In June of 2013, Edward Snowden, a twenty-nine-year-old former CIA employee, leaked thousands of top secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents to journalist Glen Greenwald. Branded as a whistleblower, Snowden reignited a debate about private citizens who reveal government secrets that should be exposed but may endanger the lives of others. Like the late Karen Silkwood, whose death in a car accident while bringing incriminating evidence against her employer to a meeting with a New York Times reporter is still a mystery, Snowden was intent upon revealing the controversial practices of his employer, a government contractor. Rightly or wrongly, Snowden and Silkwood believed that their revelations would save lives. In his riveting, thought-provoking book, Richard Rashke weaves between the lives of these two controversial figures and creates a narrative context for a discussion of what constitutes a citizen’s duty to reveal or not to reveal.